|
|
|
|
|
| There is something in the composition of an heroic poem, a poem
| of many parts, elaborate and sustained, which naturally awakes our
| sympathy. The author needs to be supported in his undertaking by
| far other than vulgar aims; he cannot hope for golden rewards, nor
| for general praise. When he sits down to his work, and its length
| stretches out before him, the most fluent pen will hang suspended,
| loath to begin a great labour; the most sanguine heart sink at the
| task before it, glancing over the visionary scheme, the Alps upon
| Alps which must be surmounted. How many bright expectations
| must fade in discouragement, how many fancied successes yield to
| the severity of a calmer judgment; how many images, clear in the
| distance, must pale into indistinctness when their place awaits
| them; how many harshnesses must be smoothed down, and
| resolute obscurities be made intelligible, before the end comes.
| What hopeless hours, what toilsome days loom upon the fancy
| when the poet's genius will seem to desert him, or treacherously
| elude his grasp, shining on the distant peaks of his plan, and
| leaving him dark and unaided to his present task. What breaks and
| chasms in the grand design, where over-arching imagination
| reveals no path; what links wanting in the golden chain which
| conscious poverty knows not how to supply! Wakeful nights and
| care-worn days, and haunting perverse measures sounding on
| wearied ears, self-mistrust, dread of others, all these casting their
| shadows before, must dog the steps, and float dark phantoms round
| the man who aspires to write an epic; who entertains that lordly
| ambition, who would concentrate all his powers in that struggle for
| fame; who would try that all but hopeless passage through
| unknown poetic seas. Facing the strictures of sharp criticism, the
| indifference of common readers, the contempt of the practical
| world; resting on the future as the hopes of the present slip away
| from him, he makes the hero's choice noble labour for inglorious
| ease; and he must needs brace and purify his mind, as the athlete
| his physical powers, by stern discipline, for the conflict. A great
| poem is a great labour; even the attempt at one is self-denial, and
| toil, and pain; it is the sweat of a man's brow, though airs from
| heaven fan him, and hope, and gleams of a loftier joy cheer him on
| his way. And so
|
| it is that with little respect for Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton as an
| author, with a deep sense of the danger of that literature to which
| he is a leading contributor, which undermines the broad principles
| of right and wrong, by the systematic substitution of sentiment for
| principle, which nicely discriminates between vice and crime, and
| sees something sublime in the perpetration of enormous sins;
| though we are well weary also of his vague philosophical
| speculations, and all the mannerism and affectation with which
| they are put forth, the yearnings after the Beautiful and the True,
| which end too often in some horrible breach of God's and man's
| laws; yet we have felt sympathy for him as a poet. It is a step in
| advance. The hero of an epic poem, for such 'King Arthur' aspires
| to be, must embody juster and nobler thoughts than the
| melodramatic hero of a novel. The very construction and outward form
| of the work is an earnest of higher aspirations, and persuades us
| beforehand to expect better things. Its very length, its twelve
| books, and innumerable stanzas, its careful arrangement, and
| adjustment of parts to the whole, and of subordinate interests to the
| main one, its attention to precedent, and obedience to critical laws,
| its fable and episodes, its allegories and morals, its similes and
| descriptions, its learning and research, the patient toil of mature
| years expended on the first dream of young romance, all forward
| this expectation; that must be a better and higher work which at
| such expense of thought and labour chooses the fabled prince of
| honour and chivalry for its theme, than those which indulge in such
| impersonations as Pelham, or Philip Beaufort, or Eugene Aram;
| there must be some chastening of the fancy, some preliminary
| purification of heart and mind for such an enterprise.
|
| And in a popular writer, who has won the public ear, there is some
| real sacrifice in thus renouncing the lighter toils of fiction, with
| their instant need of appreciation and praise, as well as more
| substantial rewards, for the ordeal of critics, who in poetry
| constitute a far larger proportion of the whole amount of readers
| than in prose. In these days the mass of readers will not read
| poetry. Poetry used to be called light reading, and young people,
| in the morality of a former generation, were warned against
| wasting too much time on its fascinations. But the ingenuity of the
| present age has invented something much lighter, and easier of
| digestion, and the popular class of readers will not now endure the
| labour of extracting the sense from verse. To most minds poetry is
| a labour; it will not reveal its meaning to the absolutely passive and
| lazy; they must take some trouble to enter into it, and that trouble
| need not now be taken by those who seek only amusement from
| reading, the case of the majority: for the popular literature of the
| day needs no
|
| more thought, or study, or preparation of mind, than any scene or
| pageant got up for the eye alone. The novels of society, which
| have poured forth within the last thirty years, with the vast
| facilities for skipping, which prose presents, should the author ever
| attempt to introduce more serious matter than stirring incident and
| sprightly dialogue, the more modern invention still of serials,
| where even the fatigues of sustained attention are avoided, and the
| voluntary effort of closing the volume on the unfinished story is
| spared the reader, the author doing this for him ~~ all have tended
| to make the most attractive, and least abstruse poetry, something of
| an effort and exertion. Most of our readers will feel that it is easier
| to spend half an hour on a half-forgotten number of Martin
| Chuzzlewit, or Vanity Fair, than in reviving the early fascinations
| of Thalaba, or the Lady of the Lake; and people commonly choose,
| not the noblest or most intense pleasures, but those which are
| easiest come at. Watch a crowd passing along the street of a gay
| watering-place, on the one side are glittering shops and gay
| equipages, on the other that plain of illimitable waters they have
| traveled so many miles to see: all eyes are fixed on the gay scene,
| and the fine things; the billows of the eternal ocean roll and flash
| in vain.
|
| And no-one could be
| better aware of all this than Sir Edward
| Bulwer Lytton, himself one of the main props and pillars of the
| circulating library, and who has tasted the glories of extensive
| popularity. All the honours of the greasy volume are his. The
| open page, redolent of cigars and candle-snuff, and contaminated
| with the stains and odours of a hundred slatternly tables and untidy
| homes, scored and underscored too, with many a comment of
| untaught but earnest sympathy, however disgusting to the refined
| reader who follows in the wake of popular appreciation, are like so
| many rents and tatters in the battle-flag, to the victorious author.
| And these are to be found only in the prose volume; or if a page of
| poetry occurs therein, that page is not more distinguished by
| difference of type, and arrangement of its lines, than by its fewer
| thumb-marks, and whiter margin. None we say, could know all
| this better than our author; he could never even hope to see a soiled
| copy of 'King Arthur;' he wrote for a smaller, a more deserving, a
| more fastidious class of readers, to whom he must present his
| thoughts in their fairest, purest, and most chastened guise. This
| was the task he must have set himself, however much formed
| habits might interfere with these resolves: and therefore by the
| very publication of a long poem our respect is raised. It is a more
| magnanimous ambition, a search for a higher fame. It runs risks, it
| braves neglects, it has essayed a hard, though it may be a pleasant
|
| task. Nor has this sympathy, which arose from the very nature of
| the case been abated by our perusal of the poem. In these days of
| skimming and glancing, and passing over uncut leaves, it is no
| usual, no inconsiderable task, to have read through deliberately, a
| poem of twelve books, averaging 170 or 180 stanzas each. What
| then must it have been to have written them? We may really feel
| lost in the greatness of the undertaking, and feel a generous pity
| too for an author whose chosen, whose darling labour it has been,
| when experience suggests how small the ultimate success and
| consideration is likely to be for such an outlay of thought and
| energy.
|
| There are many striking passages, many picturesque scenes, many
| eloquent descriptions, and yet the conviction strengthens and
| grows upon us, that the book will not be read. That it has already
| come to a second edition is no contravention of this belief: the
| author's name would cause his poem to be bought and ordered:
| people will do this to a certain extent, but they will not read it. It is
| therefore that pity mingles with our sympathy. A long poem in
| these days is a sort of forlorn hope; the chances of failure so far
| outbalance success, that just as we may always boldly hazard that
| that assemblage of human beings called the World, will on any
| given trial behave ill, so without reading it we may safely
| conjecture that a long heroic poem by any author whose standing
| and reputation are known will not be read. We take no credit to
| ourselves for the prophecy. The sight of the book, the very turning
| over the leaves, the difficulty inherent in the plan of throwing the
| mind into the narrative, or comprehending the trials and adventures
| of the hero, speak for themselves. They give a distaste, which a
| well-founded hope might perhaps overcome, but people are slow to
| entertain such hopes when they involve some real exertion on their
| parts. Not yielding to such forebodings, however, it is thus
| feelingly that our author speaks of his own finished work, in the
| concluding words of his preface.
|
|
|
| Nor do we wonder that he should entertain these sentiments. The
| book bears indications of fond and patient care. It is not an
| effusion, but it contains all his mind, all his best mind, that is:
|
| all the philosophy and speculation of his prose is refined and
| sublimated into verse; and they look and sound the better for the
| change. But, after all, it is the same thing
| over again; not only would any reader acquainted with his
| numerous novels at once recognise the author, the resemblance is
| much closer; it not only betrays the same turn of mind, it says the
| same things, and images forth the same scenes. We could prove
| this by parallel passages, but space would not allow us to do so by
| examples numerous enough for our purpose. There is something
| in repetition, which perhaps gives the notion of poverty of
| invention more than it ought. An author may say the same thing a
| great many times, because he is struck with its importance, not
| because he has nothing else to say; but certainly this poem loses
| much by perpetually sending us back to where what is said in its
| pages was said for the first time, particularly where the thought has
| not become clearer by being retouched and dwelt upon. This is
| especially the case in the recurrence of Sir E. B. Lytton's most
| characteristic abstract speculations, what may be termed his
| Adverbial Philosophy. When the Far, the High, the Real, the
| Actual, the Here, the There, the Everywhere, which have haunted
| his prose so long, appear in their pristine vagueness in his verse,
| we are tempted to interrupt so much learning, and to inquire if we
| have not heard all this before? Nor is there much in the structure
| and harmony of the verse to atone for want of freshness in the
| thoughts. The language is always careful, the verse flowing, and
| often eloquent; all exhibits facility, and considerable power; it is
| the appropriate expression of an energetic and cultivated mind, but
| it wants the nameless, indescribable charms of poetry. The writers
| of poetical prose, indeed, do not often write poetical verse; with
| them the verse is only the translation of
| the prose, not that fresh coinage of the brain which does not exist
| at all till it starts into life complete in harmonious numbers. But
| we must leave preliminary remarks to enter upon the work, such as
| it is.
|
| The author adduces with complacency, as he has reason to do, the
| examples of Milton and Dryden in support of his selection of a
| subject. But, with the utmost deference for these great men, we yet
| demur to the judiciousness of his choice. There is so much poetry
| in the name and traditions of the British Prince as might well
| suggest him as a fitting hero; but, on second and more deliberate
| thought, may his not have been found too shadowy and unreal an
| image for the mind to raise a great fabric upon? For, in truth,
| Arthur has been played with, and refined, and invested with new
| attributes and deprived of old ones, till it almost seems as if
| nobody ever did believe in him ~~ as if he never had had an
| historical existence. The Troubadours who chose him as their hero
| discard every national or probable feature. They
|
| make him and his knights exactly what suits them at the moment;
| so that he is now only thought of in conjunction with a state of
| society ~~ the chivalrous ~~ which had no existence in his day. It
| was a name, and no more, which they took, and made what they
| liked of. But in this false image set up and acknowledged, the idea
| of the true British monarch is irrecoverably lost. Judging from
| Dryden's proposed plan of celestial machinery, he must have
| designed to set aside the Arthur of popular fable, with his wizards
| and fairies, and to have recourse to something more probable ~~
| adventures which might sanction the proposed introduction of
| angels and dominions, the celestial guardians of nations, who
| contend in heaven while their several charges fight on earth. What
| Milton's Arthur would have been we presume not to guess, and the
| thought probably never took a very definite form; only we may
| feel sure that he would not have been Arthur of chivalry, for while
| extolling his ultimate choice of subject, 'long choosing and
| beginning late;' he professes himself in a tone of contempt as ~~
|
|
|
| The Arthur of the popular fancy is not a more real personage than
| King Oberon or King Cole; and perhaps it is this very freedom
| from all the trammels of fact, which has made him a favourite
| thought and theme with the poets ~~ poets of such different ages
| and such various genius.
|
| But too unlimited a freedom is really as little to be desired in art as
| in morals. Lacking all substantial reality, Sir E. B. Lytton's hero
| vacillates between extremes ~~ alternately the prince of fairy land,
| with magic gifts and unearthly trials and the man of the present day,
| acute, intelligent, well-informed: and this breach of what the
| critics quaintly call 'manners' in the hero, with whom it has still
| been the author's wish to observe them, is more conspicuous in the
| general conduct of the poem. It is, in fact, too often a masque; the
| personages are men of our own time, wearing the disguise of
| knights or ancient Britons, as the case maybe; much as the fine
| ladies of the last century arrayed themselves in flowers and crooks,
| and, in spite of hoops and high-heeled shoes, called themselves
| Arcadian shepherdesses. In the author's elaborate portraits of the
| Knights of the Round Table, the reader's attention is entirely
| engaged in seeking for their originals in our army or the senate;
| and sometimes disguise is so completely thrown off, that it is
| evident the modern has forgotten to assume the gorgeous
|
| habit of his part, and appears upon the stage in plain clothes. So it
| is with Ludovick, king of the Vandals, and his counselor Astutio
| ~~ in other words, Louis Philippe and Guizot. The introduction of
| this monarch is, indeed, as fatal to all illusion as was the
| appearance of the mouse in the fairy tale; the pretended princess
| did not more instantaneously change to her old feline form and
| nature, than does our poet into the eager politician at the scent of
| this outwitter of his house and name. Until we have had the whole
| quarrel out, and have witnessed all the revenge that words can take,
| we are withheld from all thought or interest in the remote theme
| which professes to engage our attention. A dangerous experiment
| in the poet, as those far seeing glasses into the past, through which
| he would win one glance, are not easily or readily re-adjusted,
| when once their focus has been rudely disturbed.
|
| For the reader's sake, however, we will arrange them to the best of
| our power, and give to those who have not yet read for themselves
| some insight into the fable.
|
| Such as he is, then, our poet has chosen Arthur for his hero; and
| has taken the popular view of him as the head and founder of
| chivalry, with all chivalric symbols and accompaniments, rather
| than adhered to the few and faint glimpses of his historical
| character; and we will not quarrel with this decision; for the
| popular mind knows very little of British life under the Roman
| sway, and may have too barbarous a notion of an ancient Briton
| whom history from earliest childhood described to us as a very
| unsophisticated personage, but by no means a theme for heroic
| song. At the same time, he prefers keeping so far to probability as
| to confine his kingdom to South Wales, instead of suffering him to
| reign over the whole of Britain, according to the
| fabliaux . He considers, too, that by thus circumscribing his
| dominions he preserves his heroic dignity, as still in his
| descendants preserving what he originally held, instead of being
| ultimately dispossessed by the Saxon.
|
| The scene opens in the Vale of Carduel, synonymous with Carleon,
| in the Usk, and supposed to be the capital of Arthur's dominions.
| This city is invested by the poet with an importance and a beauty,
| which, though somewhat beyond our notions of rigid truth, is
| allowable in the very shadowy realm of his romance. However, it
| seems that certain chroniclers attest to the 'gilded domes of
| Carduel,' and other signs of Roman civilization. In this vale the
| king keeps holiday. It is spring time ~~ the poet's month of May
| ~~ and knights and ladies rejoice in the glad season. The king at
| once shares and reasons upon the universal joy: ~~
|
|
|
|
| And all the gay circle echoed, 'Time is but to blame.' When
| suddenly there gloomed upon the circle, 'the shade of some
| phantasmal thing,' which muttering from its spectral veil, (much
| after the fashion of that Dweller of the Threshold which haunts the
| pages of Zanoni,) summons the king away. Arthur rises from his
| dream of pleasure, and follows the phantom within the thick shade
| of a neighbouring forest.
|
| It was long before he reappeared, his countenance bearing traces of
| an unearthly conflict, with its pale features and involuntary
| shudderings; though repressed by kingly pride. Stedfastly refusing
| to give any account of his adventure, he returns with his
| discomfited train to the city. At midnight he rises from his
| sleepless couch, and walks out upon the walls of the city. There
| the lone taper shining from Merlin's tower strikes his eye, and at
| once he resolves to make the enchanter a sharer in his dread secret.
| We will give, in his own words, the author's description of the
| great magician: these possessors of unearthly knowledge are a
| favourite theme with him: ~~
|
|
|
|
|
| There is something in this parenthesis of the wizard ~~ 'The young,
| perchance are right,' ~~ a little too commonplace and merely moral
| to suit our notions of the character; but, throughout, Merlin ~~ of
| all antique conceptions the most ancient ~~ has too much of the
| modern talker and philosopher about him. The author desires only
| to make him a sage ~~ a sage with him is a man of modern
| discoveries and ways of thought ~~ so that he gives him none of
| the characteristics of one conversant with and master of the unseen
| demon world, a lore which must necessarily separate him from
| merely human instincts.
|
|
|
| Arthur then reveals to the enchanter his mysterious adventure in
| the forest, where the phantom had led him to a black, sunless pool,
| and there shown him, as in a mirror, the miseries and final
| conquest of his race by the Saxon; accompanying this fatal pageant
| with words of gloomy prophecy. To this Arthur had replied in
| indignant despair, and the phantom vanished. The enchanter then
| has recourse to his magic arts, and there ensues a great turmoil of
| unseen spirits, which shakes the tower to its foundations, and casts
| Arthur into a swoon. When day returns he wakes, to find Merlin
| by his side with the mystic answer his charms have won. It is
| ordained that for one year the king must leave his kingdom, to
| wander forth alone in search of three gifts, by which alone the evil
| augury of the demon-pool can be averted.
|
|
|
|
| 'Up sprang the king,' in ardent hope and firm resolve, and that day
| departs on his mission, while the prophet summons a council in the
| halls of Carduel, and reveals to the assembled princes their king's
| self-exile. A tender parting between Arthur and his bosom friend,
| Sir Lancelot, closes the first book.
|
| The second opens with some caustic reflections on the great fact,
| that let who will be missing, who will depart from us, the world
| still goes on its way; still the same hopes and fears actuate us; and
| Carduel, though the most loyal of cities, did without its king ~~ all
| but his three faithful friends, Lancelot, Caradoc, and Gawaine, who
| are leading personages in the after narrative. The last knight is a
| sort of butt in the Fabliaux , and therefore
| occupies the same post in the present poem. We feel him to be a
| great misfortune to the book. It is no real recommendation of a
| joke that it is five hundred or a thousand years old; yet this is the
| only justification of the grotesque incidents and dilemmas which
| form this knight's career. These adventures are, however,
| evidently great favourites with the author; who dwells upon them,
| and returns to them, and secretly chuckles over them. They are
| also vehicles for satire of modern ways of thinking and acting,
| which he thinks felicitous, and which, indeed, sometimes do
| possess humour. Sir Gawaine, then, is the lawful depositary of all
| the wit and waggery of the volume; but what infatuation could
| have induced an author aspiring to the highest walk of poetry ~~
| building himself a name and place for his fame to dwell in ~~ what
| evil genius, we ask, could have led him to introduce his bard ~~
| the bard of song who is destined for so bright a career and so
| glorious an end ~~ whose muse is to sway men's hearts, and teach
| them to triumph over pain and death ~~ to exhibit him first in a
| ridiculous
|
| light. When, in the eleventh book, Caradoc has to do heroic deeds
| ~~ to lead on a despairing nation to victory ~~ does the author
| suppose that his reader can forget the original epic? No; he has
| placed us permanently above his bard; he has constituted us critics.
| It is irrevocably fixed and settled in our minds that Sir Caradoc
| was a scribbler of bad verses, which would have been pronounced
| great stuff in these enlightened days.
|
|
|
| While these three faithful friends mused over their absent lord,
| Merlin presents himself to them, and informs them that one of
| them is destined to join and aid the object of their thoughts. After
| some mystic trials, the choice falls on Lancelot, who receives from
| the enchanter a ring, in which a fairy hand ever points the way he
| should go; and the story returns to Arthur's adventures. Arrived at
| the sea-shore, he is gifted with a mysterious guide in the form of a
| dove, which deserves some distinct notice at our hands, as to the
| sacrifice of the probable, which Sir E. B. Lytton, in common with
| the critics, considers essential to the interest of an epic poem; the
| snow-white bird develops, towards the end of the book, into the
| fair bride of song, the spotless Genevieve: ~~
|
|
|
|
|
| The first flight of the mystic bird brings our hero into the court of
| Louis Philippe, and right into the thick of modern politics. An
| author should not thus play tricks with the harmony and
| consistency of his poem. No bird files its own nest. It is hard
| enough, without these rough shocks, to keep up our belief in a tale
| of wildest romance ~~ by belief meaning a state of mind to receive
| things in a certain order, in fit harmony and relation.
|
| If the author is so intent on unmasking the wiles of his personal
| enemy, and triumphing over his downfall, as to forget his story,
| can he expect the reader that he shall obediently take up the thread
| of the real narrative when he chooses to resume it, and follow the
| hero with due credence, in his fairy conflicts with wild men and
| beasts and demons? In fact, however much the scheme of this
| poem may have been a boyish fancy, the conduct of it betrays,
| throughout, the man of modern times and modern ways of thinking.
| He has none of that infatuation for the age
| and the scene he portrays to carry him clear over, or only faintly to
| touch upon the modern analogies which present themselves.
| However there is a slight attempt to identify Arthur with the
| modern scene. It occurs to King Ludovick at first as a subject of
| regret that he should have no unmarried daughter to propose for so
| excellent a match as the British king: but he may have a sister: ~~
|
|
|
|
| In this dilemma he has recourse to his friend Astutio: ~~
|
|
| The snow-white dove takes alarm at their conference, and compels
| her charge to take a hasty leave of the Vandal court, just in time to
| escape being betrayed by his unscrupulous host into the hands of a
| Saxon embassage come to ask the Vandal aid against their enemies
| the British. With the Saxon Harold we return to the legitimate
| story. He is a heathen, and a barbarian; and represents a brave foe
| under this twofold disadvantage. On hearing that Arthur has just
| quitted the Vandal court, he pursues with bloodhounds to track his
| unknown course; and, bidding adieu to the king and his ministers,
| and his marriageable son, and all the details of modern civilization
| on which for many stanzas we have dwelt, we pursue Arthur into
| the remote and desolate wilds where his destiny leads him. Here
| are some graphic scenes. In the two following extracts we see that
| taste for symmetry, as opposed to the picturesque, which always
| characterises this author; and which gives grace to so many of his
| pictures. In all his scenes, whether of beauty or terror, this
| symmetry is observable. The wolf and the savage, on opposite
| sides of the ravine, hold their equal course. The king takes his
| statue-like position on the circular mound, a grove on either side.
| And in subsequent scenes, however various in other
|
| respects, this love of order, of due balance and proportion, are
| conspicuous. Whether it be a procession of maidens, a ridge of
| ice-rocks, a circle of Titan giants ~~ images of symmetrical
| arrangements are always occurring.
|
| In the meanwhile the king has made some progress on his journey;
| and comes, towards night, to an idol shrine.
|
|
|
| Unconscious of the double foe, Arthur lies down to sleep under a
| beech tree, the wakeful dove resting among its branches. The man
| and the wolf reach him at the same moment, the one
|
| prepares to spring; the other lifts the dagger to strike. The next
| moment the king is roused from his slumbers by a dull crash, a
| horrible discord from the howlings of the beast and the groans of
| man.
|
|
|
| By heroic strength Arthur strangles the wolf in his grasp, and
| releases his savage foe, whose first act is to renew his assault in
| vindictive impotence. Arthur with a noble pity disarms and
| reasons, and in the end converts the wild heathen to Christianity,
| and then passes on his way. Soon at the same spot arrives Harold
| with his bloodhounds still tracking the adventurer's path. They are
| observed in their furious pursuit by the Aleman convert, who,
| unperceived by them, suspects their design. At length, the hounds
| come within sight of their prey.
|
|
|
|
|
| There follows a combat between Arthur and Harold, with such
| feats of valour on the hero's part as are becoming the occasion,
| concluding with a general skirmish between the Saxon retinue and
| a band of Aleman savages, whom the convert had brought to the
| rescue. The fray terminates in a truce between the hostile parties,
| and a picture is drawn of the hero and the hovering dove which
| would better suit our taste were it not obviously, though perhaps
| unconsciously, borrowed from a sacred scene of which we can
| endure no parody.
|
| And now the story suddenly transports us to a very different scene.
| All poets of all times have loved to imagine a terrestrial paradise, a
| blissful region, somewhere short of Heaven. It is the imaginative
| child's earliest dream ~~ all ages and all climes have indulged in
| the vision; on the tops of mountains, in hidden valleys, on islands
| beyond the sea, in the spaces of mid air, in palaces below the deep,
| amid the secret glittering treasures of the hills, the fancy has sought
| to make for itself a home, a refuge from all the change and stir of
| this outer world.
|
| The thought is no doubt a tradition ~~ a memory of our lost Eden
| ~~ however much each erring human fancy may tarnish its
| brightness or colour it with its own longings or impressions.
| Perhaps a Christian man ought not to build his fairy isle of rest in
| heathendom, but unquestionably a religion of definite faith and
| stern duty finds no fit home in these elysiums where duty has no
| place or where all duties are easy.
|
| To one of these scenes of unbroken happiness we are transported
| by our author, who lavishes on it a wealth of luxurious description.
| The charge of plagiarism is so often unfair, and minds like those of
| the present writer so much oftener repeat themselves than
| consciously borrow from any other source, that we will not say that
| the idea of Ægle and her unchanging kingdom is taken from M. D'Israeli's similar fancy of a
| beautiful young queen and a last home for heathen deities; we only
|
| remark upon the close resemblance in several points between the
| realms of Astarte and of Ægle. Before Italy had yielded to the
| aggression of early Roman power, a wise Etrurian chief,
| forewarned of the conquest of his country, fled from 'fruitful
| Fiesolè' with his household gods and a chosen band of followers to
| seek a secure asylum beyond Ausonian bounds.
|
| Here it chanced that one of their band fell from the top of some
| huge Alp, and in searching for his remains to perform the pious
| rites of sepulture they discovered, through some small chasm at the
| end of a rugged defile, a valley of most exquisite beauty and
| fertility. The access to this sunny region was only through a long
| and narrow cave. Through this they passed, and taking possession,
| built themselves a Sylvan city. Nothing now failed them but the
| smiles of home ~~ an adventurous few returned, and wives and
| children soon gladdened the hearth. With these objects of dearer
| care they brought the gifts of their parent soil, corn, the grape, and
| the olive, and now every want and wish supplied, 'they closed the
| rocky portals of the place' to preserve their posterity from the evils
| of the outer world. And centuries passed by and brought no
| change: ~~
|
| This fairy scene is now peopled by expectant bands, ~~ bands of
| maidens who remind the poet by turns of the Naiads, the Oreads,
| the Napææ, the Hours. These wreathed with garland fetters and
| linked hand in hand are waiting the coming of some glorious
| stranger, they know not whom, some gifted messenger from the
| gods.
|
| And thus it is. The kingly race is now reduced to its last scion ~~ a
| princess more lovely than a poet's dream, and by the laws of that
| ancient and unchanging realm the daughters of the royal race may
| not marry or intermingle with the meaner tribes of the valley, their
| choice being confined to the 'pure circle of the Lartian race.'
|
| Who, then, is to wed the fair Ægle? The Arch Augur in the
| difficulty consults the archives, and finds that
| twice before in their annals the stock has been reduced to
| one solitary stem; and to renew the race, ~~ rather than break
| through the laws of custom and introduce the seeds of ambition
| and consequent anarchy, ~~ the priests had secretly opened the
| portal into the
|
| outer world, and lured in from thence some wanderer into their
| hidden valley, announcing the stranger to their simple flock as a
| gift from the gods. As such he was the idol of an hour, but his
| season of bliss and homage was short as it was blissful. Sir E.
| Bulwer's priests never share the harmless or generous qualities of
| the people whom they govern. Whether they worship Odin, or
| Freya, or the gentler Etrurian divinities, or a Master indeed Divine,
| they are equally merciless and inexorable. He has a notion of
| priestcraft which places them all in the same category. The Priests
| therefore made no difficulty of getting rid of their troublesome
| guest when his task was done.
|
| They lead their unconscious victim to the temple of the god of the
| Shades, which bounds the opposite end of the valley; there a dark
| rushing stream engulfs the hapless bridegroom.
|
| For nine days the Augur had announced the coming of the
| heavenly spouse, ~~ for nine days he had wandered in vain search
| through the wild outer region of rocks and caves, rarely trod by
| man; on the tenth, the signal torch streams from the temple, the
| divine stranger comes. We will not insult our reader's penetration
| by a more definite announcement.
|
|
|
| We need not say the mutual impression is as instantaneous as the
| augur could desire. The poor dove may well retire from
|
| the scene, and coo in solitude amidst the gloomy pines and rugged
| rocks without that paradise where her hero has found a rest; her
| guiding wing is desired no longer.
|
| The same scene is resumed after some digression in the fourth
| book, the author endeavouring to relieve the luxury of florid
| description by some touches of his lighter manner.
|
|
|
| The priest then with 'laboured words and slow' proceeds to
| acknowledge Arthur as a branch of the same parent stock; judging
| from his language that he, too, was of Phnician origin. Arthur
| has never heard of Rasena, by which the augur designates Etruria,
| but owns to some dim recollection of the Phnician name, and
| courteously expresses his satisfaction at hearing the priest speak ~~
|
| The priest then anxiously inquires the latest news from Rasena.
|
|
|
|
|
| It is thus, that for the sake of a jest, the author again sacrifices
| reality and all those 'decencies' of which the critics make such
| point, and places the religion of his poem on as shadowy basis as
| the poetry of his bard. We speak of it as a matter of taste, being
| aware that we have no reason to expect from the poet the propriety
| of feeling inspired by an earnest faith; but, surely, in this view
| alone, he ought to identify himself with the creed of his hero, and
| be jealous for it, not, in his desire to exhibit an acquaintance with
| all religious systems, to admit flippant doubts and insinuations
| against articles of belief which all Christians hold in awe or
| reverence.
|
| But to return to our story. While Arthur passes away his time in
| this garden of delights, the reader is carried back to Sir Lancelot,
| who has set forward on his search, after receiving the friendly ring;
| he encounters the wild Convert and his sons, but the meeting only
| produces an interchange of information and courtesies. They tell
| him of his royal master's combat with the Saxons; he in return
| acquaints them with some facts of his own history, his gifted
| infancy, and the fairy charm by which he is protected from each
| watery peril. He then passes on his way till he reaches the rugged
| walls of Arthur's luxurious prison, and there wanders, almost as
| much at fault as the child in the game of magic music; the ring,
| like the sounding
|
| strain, resolutely pointing one way, yet revealing nothing but
| inaccessible fastnesses. In one of these ineffectual searches he
| encounters what seemed a phantom horse, so 'fleshless, flitting,
| wan, and shadowy.' At the sight of Lancelot it paused, and feebly
| neighed, and the knight recognises Arthur's war-horse, still bearing
| its armour, and its master's accoutrements, soiled, rusted, and
| mouldering away. The heart of the seeker fell at these ominous
| indications, but leading the reluctant charger, he pursues his way
| through a narrow gorge of black rocks, down which invisible
| torrents sweep, till he reaches a broad lake, and his ears are greeted
| by the toll of a bell from a convent on its margin. Having brought
| help so near, the story returns to the hero, still in his happy dream
| of love, on which the poet dwells with many graceful expressions
| of sympathy, and lofty encomiums on the power and salutary
| wonders of that much-lauded passion. Arthur and Ægle have
| talked Phnician together ~~ we are not informed how long, to
| their mutual delight, when he is startled by a missive borne into the
| inaccessible valley by Merlin's fit messenger, the raven, who
| figures not seldom in the narrative; in this instance as a serious
| personage, more commonly in impish and grotesque fashion. The
| enchanter tells him that the Saxons are invading his native land.
| At this announcement all the king and the hero return upon him; he
| starts as from a trance; the silken ties of love and ease are broken.
| At once he seeks the augur reclining under Dodonian boughs, and
| bids him ~~
|
| The augur's reply is prompt and decisive.
|
|
| Arthur promises secrecy on his knightly word, but persists in his
| demand. The augur contemptuously upbraids him with treachery
| to Ægle; in vain Arthur protests his faith, and promises to return;
| the augur is inexorable, and still hopes through Ægle's charms and
| persuasions to detain him, but when these are vain, or rather when
| she submits, and acquiesces in those higher principles of action
| which he pleads, though only dimly comprehending his reasons for
| preferring war to peace, and duty to love; the indignant priest leads
| him to the only outlet permitted to him from that blissful kingdom,
| through dark forests, and cities of tombs, to the gloomy temple of
| the Shades. This passage gives room for a full description of an
| Etrurian temple, and of the mythology and divinities of this ancient
|
| people, about which modern research has discovered so much.
| Behind the inner doors of this fatal shrine, yawns a cavern where
| dark waters flow, ~~ smoothly flow for a space, ~~ but beyond,
| where the torch-glimmer cannot reach, is heard the turmoil of
| hidden cataracts. A boat like Charon's is moored to embark the
| self-condemned on this hopeless voyage. After giving the
| hero-king this glimpse of his fate, the augur again offers Ægle, and
| return to happiness; but Arthur defies death in lofty words, and
| seizing the torch descends into the frail bark as it drifts along the
| smooth treacherous waters. The dove, absent so long, wings its
| way before, into the dark void. Meanwhile Ægle recovers from
| her first trance of grief, and in the impulse of despair resolves to
| follow her lover. She appears calm and resolute, amongst her
| wondering people, and demands the way the augur and his victim
| have taken. A hundred hands point towards the gloomy fane. She
| will at least see him once more: to her are unknown the fatal
| secrets of that outlet ~~ he is leaving her; she knows not that he is
| going to death. She reaches the aisles of the temple, and there the
| death-lights guide her to the yawning cave and the livid waters.
| She sees afar in the gloom that noble form, that fair and dauntless
| brow; but fast the bark drifts from her, soon the last gleam fades;
| she hears only the rushing cataracts beyond. Voiceless she stood
| in despair, voiceless the augur stood in triumphant revenge. He
| loved her more than child, but his only consolation were words of
| vengeance. He tells her she need now fear no rival; but his words
| only rouse and give strength to her grief. She yearns to follow her
| lover, even to death; and breaking away from the hands that would
| hold her back, she leaps into the dark stream: one gleam of her
| white garments, and she is seen no more.
|
| The scene then changes to the outlet of that fearful torrent, where it
| falls impetuously into the lake, and Lancelot watches in vague
| expectation. But the dove soon appears, guiding his steps up cliffs
| and almost inaccessible chasms, to where the wild stream gains a
| temporary respite, forming itself a basin amid rocks and caves.
| And here on the verge lies Arthur, still wrapped in a swoon from
| the struggles of that fearful passage, and in his arms the dead form
| of Ægle; whom he had rescued too late from the vortex of
| maddening waters. This episode terminates with two funeral
| hymns for Ægle; one Eturian, and sung in her own vale, the other
| by Christian monks in the monastery to which her remains are
| borne; both commonplace, as well in ideas as language. Lyrical
| effusions breaking in upon the stately march of an heroic poem,
| should be distinguished by a peculiar grace of expression; they
| should soothe
|
| the ear with music, and take our fancy with that gentle surprise
| which an harmonious happy choice of words always inspires in the
| treatment of a subject, however familiar; as all that can be said on
| death and the grave, and the loss of friends must needs be.
|
| And now the hero enters upon the threefold search so long delayed.
| As he sits in gloomy apathy on the margin of the lake of Ægle's
| grave, Lancelot, who is gifted with fairy vision, discerns a
| shadowy sail float along the waters, and direct its course towards
| the royal mourner. But Arthur's eyes behold nothing of the
| phantom bark till the dove bears to him a leaf plucked from Ægle's
| grave. Then he remembers Merlin's prophetic words: ~~
|
|
|
| He steps into the magic bark; Lancelot in vain springs after him,
| the king alone enters upon his perilous search, ~~ which ends the
| fifth book.
|
| The sixth is devoted exclusively to Sir Gawaine's comic adventures,
| into which we need not enter at length. Merlin having also sent
| him forth to aid the king, gives the formidable raven as his guide,
| which maliciously leads him through a long course of scrapes,
| dilemmas, and adventures, some of them first sung by the
| troubadours, others the poet's original conception. Among these
| last the habits and peculiarities of the raven suggest to the
| perplexed knight the thought of exorcism, which, perhaps, the
| earlier poets would not have deemed a fit subject for a jest. With
| this view he proceeds to consult the bishop Henricus, in whom it is
| not difficult to detect the author's portrait of a modern prelate, who
| has made himself obnoxious to liberals prosaic as well as poetical,
| by his zeal for what they affect to call forms, which yet they attack
| with the bitterness principles alone can excite.
|
| We extract a few stanzas of this graceful satire, only promising that
| something more than barren forms must be involved in a dispute
| which can bring an epic poet a thousand years out of his course to
| discuss the question of the black gown or the surplice.
|
|
|
| Through a variety of mishaps Sir Gawaine finally stumbles into the
| hands of a party of Vikings, on the point of sailing northwards,
| who receive him, and a hound he has picked up by the way, as a
| sacrifice the Fates have sent to their goddess Freya.
|
| In this awkward predicament, but with spirits always alert, and
| equal to the occasion, he is left by the poet, who returns to his hero
| on the magic lake. Time does not allow us very closely to follow
| his adventures under its waves; he sees the forest growing on a
| single stem, and rejects its glittering, costly fruit, insidiously
| offered by the phantom for the sword of his search, ~~ ambition
| for renown. She then unwillingly conducts him to the entrance of
| the cave: the allegorical scene which follows is one of the points
| of the poem, and characteristic both of the author's style, and turn
| of thought, but our limits only allow us to extract the first picture
| which meets the seeker's eye: ~~
|
|
|
|
|
| The adventurer is greeted by the youthful Genius, and asks of the
| enthroned Three their names and office.
|
|
|
| Under these arches lies concealed by a veil the vision of a
| three-fold future, amidst these Arthur is to choose, and by his judgment
| his fate is to be decided. The first is a future of pleasures and
| luxury; the next of gold and subject labour; in the third he beholds
| himself reposing in glorified death the darling of Poetry and Fame;
| and in shadowy succession pass by him, to do him reverence, all
| the kingly heroes and high actors in the drama of our country's
| history. The vision ends at the close of thirteen centuries, by
| Cymri's daughter on the Saxon throne, our queen, amongst her
| noble ancestry, being supposed to include the king of Welsh
| romance. Arthur chooses death as the life of Fame, and grasps the
| hilt of the diamond glaive, which, however, will not move to his
| touch. The dove flew forth and alighted on the thorn-wreath of the
| crowned statue; then rose the vulture and up-coiled the asp to seize
| their victim. The image announces itself as Fame, and demands
| the sacrifice which every altar claims. From Arthur he requires the
| sacrifice of the heart's affections figured in the dove; but the hero
| refuses even Fame, at the expense of trust betrayed, and renounces
| the prize: ~~
|
|
|
| At these heroic words his trial is over, the vulture sails sullenly
| back from its prey, the asps die of their own poison, the
| thorn-wreath blooms into roses, and light and joy blaze around. After
| this first achievement the story diverges to Sir Lancelot
|
| and a fair damsel, Genevra, the daughter of Saxon Harold, and
| bosom friend of Genevieve, youngest daughter of the Saxon King
| Crida, and Arthur's fabled queen. Both maidens have been
| converted to Christianity by a British female captive, and at their
| baptism took these similar names. The reader will readily perceive
| in this device a praiseworthy attempt on the part of the author to
| clear away the scandal which attaches to Arthur's Genevieve,
| current in Dante's day, who traces to that queen's baleful example,
| Francesca's eternity of woe. From Lancelot and Genevra and their
| innocent loves, we return to Sir Gawaine and his adventures with
| the Vikings, which, though out of place and offending the taste
| grievously where they stand, are written with ease and a certain
| Giant Grumbo kind of pleasantry. An extract from the argument
| will give the reader the only insight into them we have space for:
| ~~
|
|
|
| And now Arthur enters upon his second search. The silver shield
| of Lok ~~ the Scandinavian Mars. It chanced that Genevra, at the
| moment of her first meeting with Lancelot, was on her way to be
| the bride of the heathen Norwegian king, under the escort of a fleet
| of his ships. A dream had warned her not to resist her father's will
| in this matter, but to embark on this most unwelcome errand. A
| tempest had cast her fleet on the coast, and the crews were
| recruiting their stores. Thus it was that in Arthur's need he found a
| ship to bear him on his way. The rest of the fleet, won over by
| Genevra's persuasions, bore herself and Lancelot back to Carduel.
| The ship with the raven flag sails northward into the regions of
| eternal winter, on which the author has expended all his powers of
| description, perhaps with too much labour and repetition of
| characteristic features. Still it is amongst the most new and
| striking portions of the book. The author thus alludes to it in his
| preface: ~~
|
|
|
|
|
| The north ~~ the region of silence and cold, and luminous darkness
| and eternal snow ~~ has indeed a great and mysterious fascination.
| There is something in its deep repose which haunts the mind of
| busy life; in the thought of its cold, which fans and soothes the
| feverish stir of action and passion; in its unchanging features which
| tranquillizes and sobers; in its mysteries which sustains our interest.
| But for such undefinable attractions how was it ever peopled, or
| how does it still draw adventurers towards its treacherous and fatal
| shores? It is to feelings like these that our poet seeks to give
| expression in his pictures of the north. Some of these, vivid and
| graphic as they are, we cannot but think suffer from that display of
| learning of which the author has made his boast, and jealously
| defended from the attacks of critics. For example, in referring to
| those bright hues which relieve the cold tints of the arctic region,
| we feel that nothing is gained to the general impression he seeks to
| produce by tracing effects to their alleged causes. We would rather
| not have the green of northern seas thus accounted for ~~
|
| this and a similar assertion being further explained in the following
| note: ~~
|
|
| We frankly confess that this statistical statement does not give us
| any better notion of the number than we had before. Of course, if
| the animalcules are there at all, there must be a great many of them.
| For our part, we are rather tired of the subject of animalculæ,
| which positively becomes a disease of some minds, and sticks to
| them with a sort of parasitical tenacity. It is a point on which we
| indulge an obstinate incredulity. We will not believe that every
| drop of water swarms with those monsters if we could only see
| them; and, indeed, we know that it takes a great deal of cooking
| and doctoring to produce a drop which will do credit to the
| microscope, and that a sharp eye could detect most of the living
| creatures exhibited to us without its aid. However, they are a great
| fact with our author, and one of the pillars of his philosophy.
| Mejnour, the world-old sage, makes it the basis of a theory; and
| Merlin, whom we supposed
|
| occupied by another sort of invisible world, takes up the same
| theme: ~~
|
| It is the vocation of science to develop impurities as a preliminary
| to counteracting or destroying them; but the sparkling
| health-giving stream of poesy need not so pollute its waves.
|
| We have not space for the opening invocation to winter, a fine
| passage, though further illustrating what we have said. Into these
| regions, heralded by the dove, sails the ship of the wonder-seeker
| ~~ the crew smitten down by sickness (the scurvy, we are
| informed in a note), and Arthur alone retaining his vigour and
| majestic resolution. The ship is attacked and almost overwhelmed
| by a herd of Walruses, when the collision of two icebergs separates
| the combatants. They escape one danger, however, only to fall
| into another; the vessel becomes ice-locked, and by Arthur's
| persuasion, is at length abandoned by her crew, who build
| themselves huts of its shattered relics. The dove has found an herb
| which heals their sickness, but their present life is a living death;
| Arthur alone is sustained by dauntless courage and the sense of a
| task to be performed.
|
|
|
| In this scene of desolation the mysterious sympathy between
| Arthur and the dove is further strengthened, and, indeed, this
| mystic guide acts so very much the part of a wife, that, in this
| respect, our hero must be considered to have the advantage over
| modern adventurers into the same inhospitable regions, where we
| believe that softer sex is now considered an incumbrance. While
| wandering in these dreary trackless wilds, the king one day, to his
| joy, discovers a human footstep, a sign, whether of friend or foe,
| almost equally welcome; and, following the track of feet, the dove
| guides him into the midst of a dwarf-like band of Esquimaux.
| These, emerging from the fog, like goblins out of the inner earth, at
| first make a show of hostilities, but recoil before Arthur's majestic
| presence; when suddenly steps from among them a nobler form, in
| whom, even in his rude garb of hides, is recognised a 'son of light.'
| At his appearance the clamouring pigmies are silent and bend the
| knee in reverence. The stranger approaches Arthur, and
| commences an address in his own tongue, when he starts ~~ stops
| ~~ springs forward, and at the same moment Arthur and Sir
| Gawaine recognise each other. The good knight has escaped the
| jaws of Freya to be the king of the Esquimaux tribes. The meeting
| is certainly
|
| one of those coincidences not to be looked for every day, but
| not the less joyful to the two adventurers. Arthur's followers are
| soon revived under the cares of the 'pigmæan crew,' and borne to
| their warmer huts, where Sire Gawaine has made himself as
| comfortable as adverse circumstances would permit. Here, while
| he regales the monarch on a slice of seal's flesh, he narrates his
| own vicissitudes from the commencement, and enters into a
| philosophical controversy with his royal master on the part, for
| good or evil, the raven, to which he still bears a grudge, has played
| in his destiny. In his turn, Arthur reveals to his light hearted friend
| such facts of his own history as he deems suited to his ear, and
| announces the object of his northern voyage, the silver shield of
| Lok, about which Gawaine remembers to have heard certain
| legends from his pigmy subjects. After this colloquy, ~~ and for
| homely human interest, we think this meeting of the two friends in
| those inexorable northern wilds to be among the best points of the
| poem ~~ Sir Gawaine wraps the king in bear-skins to seek needful
| repose, while he goes in search of more definite information. The
| description which follows of sunrise, after the long polar night, is
| very impressive: ~~
|
|
|
| With the sun comes Arthur's second great trial; and a formidable
| description of the cave, the mouth of an extinct crater, where
| dwells the guardian of the treasure, opens the tenth book. This
| guardian is a monster, half giant, half dwarf, whose shadow plays
| ominously before the entrance of the cavern, himself still invisible;
| an idea to be found elsewhere in the author's works. Arthur's
| approach is scented from afar by a herd of white bears, who form
| the flock of this goblin pastor; and whose uncouth movements and
| clumsy ambuscades are very elaborately
|
| described. He comes, and hunger conquering awe and fear, they
| attack him; but the diamond glaive repels them with great slaughter;
| when from the cave rushes the owner of the shadow, the giant-dwarf;
| whose presence casts a double chill over the air, and even
| brings fear on the fearless. 'Fear was on the bold.' Here ensues a
| colloquy, wherein the dwarf, in rage at this invasion of his dismal
| region, seeks to awe and terrify the pale but dauntless king; but in
| the end is forced to admit him within the subterranean region: and
| Arthur enters upon a wild and terrible scene; where Nature carries
| on her chemical experiments on the largest scale. Here, in the
| glow of lava and the raging of hidden fire, he is conducted through
| countless geological remains, the wrecks of the antediluvian world
| ~~ iguanadons, mammoths, and other 'lurid skeletons of vanished
| races,' who yawn and grin upon the invader of their realm. The
| watchful dwarf looks for some sign of fear at the hideous spectacle;
| for had the mortal faltered or quailed, he must become the fiend's
| prey. But, through all sights and sounds of dread, Arthur walks
| unmoved, fixing his eyes on the dove: the evil spirits of that place,
| who gather round him, being in their turn awed and held back by
| the glare of the magic sword. At length he enters upon a vast mine,
| the Hall of Lok, where the demon sleeps, guarded by the corpses of
| Titans, who kneel around in glittering armour ~~ giants who
| perchance had heard the trump of Jubal, ~~ whose guilt provoked
| the deluge. Within this outer enclosing circle sit the Valkyrs, or
| choosers of the slain ~~ the Scandinavian Fates, spinning the webs
| of endless wars ~~ guarding the unseen couch of Lok. Here the
| dwarf shows Arthur the end of his search; within those curtains
| rests the sleeping god, whom the Valkyrs themselves dare not
| waken into terrible and vengeful life. For an instant, Arthur's
| human heart fails; but faith, 'The Eos of the world to come,' came
| to his aid.
|
|
| and the story leaves the final unspeakable horrors of that conflict,
| unsung.
|
| Meanwhile, Sir Gawaine and the Norwegians have tracked
| Arthur's course, and in their turn are attacked by the bears; in
| whose manuvres the author takes peculiar pleasure; till the strife
| is interrupted by unearthly sounds from the supernatural
| inhabitants of the cave. Pestilential vapours stupefy the whole
| band: when they awake to consciousness, the dove is poised in air
| hovering over the unconscious form of Arthur, his armour dinted,
| hewn, and crushed, the bright falchion dim with dark
|
| gore, and awe on the rigid face; yet on his arm is clasped the silver
| shield, the wondrous prize dimmed ~~ tarnished ~~ grimed; but
| the pure metal shining through all. Many days followed ere the
| king recovered from his trance; nor did he ever breathe to mortal
| what had passed in that unearthly conflict. We quite acquiesce in
| this silence; yet the reader is, perhaps, critical enough to suspect
| that the poet has no clearer idea of what did actually transpire than
| ourselves. It very frequently happens with this author to raise a
| good groundwork for curiosity, and fail in the superstructure.
|
| The hero, once more on earth, had no other mission on these ice-bound
| shores; so that the arrival of ships at that juncture is felt to
| be exceedingly opportune. It is a fleet from Rugen, in search of
| furs and seals; and the captain gladly lends to King Arthur one of
| his vessels, to bear him homewards. This Sir Gawaine undertakes
| to victual for the voyage, and by his golden eloquence and winning
| manners succeeds in gaining handsome contributions from the
| whole fleet. Under the dove's guidance, they soon reach more
| genial airs, and anchor at length in a Mercian haven on the English
| coast, occupied by the Saxon foe. Here Arthur's third and last gift
| is to be won. And this we must confess to have found the most
| mystical and difficult of comprehension of all his achievements;
| not made the less so by a profuse coinage of new nouns for the
| occasion ~~ the characteristic peculiarity (though in a less degree
| sanctioned by high authorities) we have already alluded to. The
| author appears to think that a subversion of the received rules of
| etymology ~~ an entire change in the uses of adjectives and
| adverbs, will greatly assist thought in all its difficulties: that
| Beauty ~~ that vain and fleeting good ~~ gains durability as the
| Beautiful: that Truth is more attainable as the True: that we shall
| understand the nature of Death better when it changes its awful
| name into The Everywhere: that distant things are brought nearer
| as the Far: and height become accessible as the High. Yet, to us,
| sublimity is attained rather by using simple words in their ordinary
| sense, than by all this transposition. Where, e.g., have we nobler
| ideas of beauty and distance than in that promise ~~ . We
| feel poetry, especially, injured by this novel affectation. But a
| habit of this kind, once formed, cannot be shaken off; it has
| become a part of Sir E. B. Lytton's mind. In the scenes we are now
| led upon, a ghost is the principal speaker; and possibly
| substantives are deemed too substantial for the language of
| shadows; so ghost-like adverbs occupy their places, and, with dim
| voice and half meaning, suggest rather than affirm the hidden
| mysteries they point at.
|
|
| No sooner, then, is Arthur landed, than the dove leads him through
| a forest to a silent hill, 'with antique ruins crowned,' on which the
| moon shines with ghastly ray. Here are ruins far anterior to the
| rude structures of Druid degeneracy known to us, and built while
| the Druid in his starry robe solved riddles to the Chaldee, and
| talked with Pythagoras; luring Brahmins from their burning clime
| to listen to Western wisdom. The style of the ruins speaks of this
| difference; being of that architecture which the discomfited
| builders of Babel disseminated over the world.
|
|
|
| In this antique seclusion the wonder-seeker sinks to sleep, and
| wakes with a start of terror to find himself deserted by his mystic
| guide. The dove is flown. A sense of desolation rushes on his
| spirit, and the fear of death at that moment falls upon him. We are
| now carried back to Carduel, as a necessary explanation of what is
| to follow. Here the Saxons are gaining the day, and the besieged
| city is sinking in famine and despondency, till roused by Caradoc,
| the author of the 'Epic on the Shelf,' now inspired by Merlin's
| prophecies to sacrifice himself for his country's cause. Unarmed,
| as the bard must be, and singing heroic songs, he leads on his
| countrymen in a desperate onslaught; charging them to hold the
| spot of his death sacred, and never to yield it to the enemy. Time,
| however, confines us to Arthur's adventures. Caradoc, after his
| glorious death, is received into heaven, where are revealed to him
| Arthur's trials and achievements; and love impels him to descend
| again to earth, to lead him through his last ordeal to happiness. He
| presents himself to his friend reft of his heavenly glory, and livid
| with fresh wounds.
|
|
|
| In the centre of those ruins stood a royal tomb. Through the iron
| doors, 'agar to every blast,' the vision passed forth with the king.
| The following passage we offer to the reader in illustration of our
| remarks on those peculiarities of diction which always appear to
| accompany the author's most favourite and characteristic
| speculations: ~~
|
|
|
|
|
| To end in smoke, is a common expression for failure: yet the
| author could hardly resent its being applied to the ghost's
| conclusions; especially to the appalling image of nonentity
| conveyed in the last line. But we must hasten on. Caradoc's spirit
| discourses further on Nature and Fate, which he affirms to be
| identical. After which, Arthur's guardian angel ~~ identical again,
| in the author's view, with conscience ~~ presents himself before
| him, and removes from his mind the fear of death; though why this
| task should be assigned to Conscience , we
| do not comprehend.
|
| On the disappearance of the angel, Arthur ventures to address the
| spirit of his friend on the question of his present happiness; when
| he, too, vanishes without reply. When lo! at the king's feet reposed
| 'a virgin shape, half woman and half child.' He has found the third,
| the crowning gift.
|
|
|
| The king wakes from his vision, to find this best gift no dream; but
| fair reality. He speaks to the maiden; but, with her finger on her
| lip, she enjoins silence.
|
|
|
| It is a pretty picture, but we do not think the author will find many
| sympathizers in this metamorphosis. If a man's wife has once been
| a bird, there seems no security that she may not relapse into the
| same form and condition again; he can never be sure of her. But
| such a conception comes fitly from an author who, in a previous
| work, has made its leading character marry an idiot: ~~ a girl so
| universally acknowledged as such as to explain why the boys do
| not follow her in the street. The writer who makes his prose hero
| happy in so singular a choice, may well espouse his epic hero to a
| dove, and think he had provided well and adequately for his
| domestic felicity. But in truth these ideas can only emanate ~~ as
| in Eastern Fable ~~ from a disparaging notion of the sex: once
| thoroughly convinced that women have souls in the same sense as
| men possess them, and these fancies will be as uncongenial to the
| imagination as they are to the understanding.
|
| The fair transformed, resuming her office of guide, leads Arthur to
| his followers, and once more taking ship, they sail to
|
| his own dominions, and there they land within sight of Carduel
| amidst signs of Saxon outrage, seeking a well known convent
| where Arthur designs to place his maiden treasure, while he
| proceeds to the defence of his capital. The convent lies in ruins;
| and roused by the surrounding desolation, Arthur pours out threats
| of vengeance against Crida, the ravager of his country, which
| excite in his silent guide an agony of terror he cannot comprehend,
| being in fact ignorant of what the reader has all along been aware,
| that Genevieve, the dove, the 'destined soother,' is indeed the
| daughter of his foe. Meanwhile a nun emerges from the ruins, who
| proves to be Arthur's kinswoman, the Abbess. She blesses his
| return, and conducts them to her hidden underground retreat, by
| means of which she had eluded Saxon cruelty; there Arthur leaves
| his charge. We pass over the mystical dreamy trances of the
| half-awakening visionary maiden, which result at length in her
| resolution to rejoin her father in the Saxon camp. The Abbess
| recognizing the hand of heaven, suffers her to depart, hanging
| round her neck a cross at once as sign and safeguard. Here, as
| throughout the poem, the reader of Sir E. Bulwer's romances must
| be struck by the recurrence of the old fancies; scenes and images
| appearing again in a different garb. Genevieve, losing her sense of
| power to warn and guide, in the resumption of the human form,
| and with it, human love for Arthur, is only a repetition of Zanoni
| losing his power to protect Viola, when he abandons himself to
| human affection for her. To both only remains the
|
|
|
| The twelfth and last book is full of stir and incident, of fighting,
| and critical conjunctions, of war and bloodshed. It takes up the
| story from the moment of Caradoc's death, which is the turning
| point of the Cymrian cause. Merlin, after addressing the people in
| a patriotic speech, dismisses them to the walls, announcing a
| renewal of the Saxon attack. From Lancelot he then demands a
| great sacrifice, that he should restore Genevra to her father Harold,
| his prophetic eye foreseeing an important part for her in
| approaching events. The knight reluctantly consents, and the
| maiden is dispatched under the guard of the Aleman Convert.
| After these preparations the scene moves to the Saxon camp, on
| which a superstitious panic has fallen since Caradoc's victory.
| This panic the priests make use of as a plea for some of the more
| barbarous rites of their religion. The Runic Soothsayer is thrown
| into a trance, in which he reveals that their god Odin demands the
| sacrifice of a Christian maiden.
|
|
| and announces the speedy coming of the destined victim. In the
| midst of baleful incantations in which king and priests share, the
| silence of the temple is disturbed by shouts from without; Crida
| rises in wrath to rebuke the comers, and is met on the threshold by
| his fair-haired daughter. Soon his natural joy at the recovery of his
| beloved and youngest born is turned to anguish by the demands of
| the priests for their victim. They hail in Genevieve the destined
| sacrifice. The father pleads that the oracle had desired a
| Christian maid, and the 'arch Elder' points to
| the cross still lying on her breast. The old king calls upon her to
| cast down and trample on the sacred symbol, but she boldly
| professes the true faith, and in wrath and despair the old king
| renounces his child. They bind the trembling victim to the stone of
| sacrifice and wait with impatience the appointed hour; when their
| horrid rites are again interrupted by the forcible entrance of Harold,
| the Saxon Thane, accompanied by his daughter Genevra, who has
| brought him to the rescue. Harold is a very liberal Pagan; he
| disputes with the priests, and while professing his belief in Odin
| will have nothing to do with the bloody rites he enjoins; he rouses
| the crouching king from his lair to arise and defend his child; but
| bowed down by superstition, Crida gives her up to death as a
| Christian and offender of the gods, on which Genevra eagerly
| professes the same faith. Harold, however, will not listen to
| theological questions while they should be fighting, and recalling
| to mind his encounter with King Arthur, declares that for his part
| he
|
| He is rebuked by the priest, who threatens to call in the Saxon host
| to hear and avenge his blasphemies. Harold accepts an appeal to
| the popular voice, and makes a proposition to the king that he and
| his men, joined by all who would willingly follow his standard,
| should renew the assault on Carduel. Let the throne of Cymri be
| the maiden's ransom. He asks but till noon to complete the
| conquest, but if refused, he withdraws from the king's cause with
| all his adherents. None, not even the priests, dare hazard the loss
| of their champion; the truce is therefore accepted, though the
| revengeful priests are not less sure of their victim. Harold departs
| on his enterprise. The king, after one embrace of his child, for
| which his superstition reproves him, repairs to the watch-tower to
| witness the combat; while the priest, his companion, surveys from
| the same height the discontented, fear-stricken multitude gathered
| in lazy apathy
|
| below, in whom he sees the instruments of his power. They
| witness the progress of Harold's assault and see him scale the walls,
| and disappear within the city, a success anything but satisfactory to
| the bloodthirsty idolater, who
|
| When suddenly from the camp at their feet rose strange cries of
| wrath, and wonder; and lo! the Saxon fleet moored beyond the
| distant forest is in flames. This is the work of Arthur, who, with
| his followers, had lain in ambush awaiting Merlin's appointed
| signal from the dragon keep of Carduel. While the Saxon camp
| rouses itself to arms, through the forest hastens the deliverer. They
| are amazed by shouts of Arthur's name, and at the same moment
| the conquerors within the city are driven back and dispossessed;
| the Pale Horse of the Saxons, which had waved triumphant for an
| hour, once more yielding to the Dragon Standard. At length
| Harold, still facing the foe, is driven forth from Carduel, to the
| savage joy of the watchful priest, who from his height witnesses
| his retreat and the sun passing the meridian. He summons Crida to
| the sacrifice: but the spirit of patriotism has seized the aged king,
| he leaves the priest to do his worst; his own place is by the
| retreating standard; his people are his children. His enthusiasm
| diffuses a glow amid their discouraged ranks.
|
|
|
| The priest had descended to complete the sacrifice, already the
| knife gleams over Genevieve, when a shaft sent as by the Fates
| from invisible hands slays the slayer, and the priest falls bathed in
| his own blood. While all stand suspended in wonder and terror,
| wild clamours are heard without. The fane is besieged by a
| dismayed multitude flying before the victor; Arthur himself ~~ in
| his own person Victory. Roused by the very extremity of the
| moment, the idolaters seek for the hand that has slain their chief,
| when suddenly sprang upon the altar-stone a grim fiend-like image.
| It is the wild Aleman, who as Genevra's escort to the Saxon camp,
| had heard the rumours of Genevieve's approaching sacrifice.
| Following unseen in Harold's train, he had concealed himself
| behind the altar till the moment came to save. Springing from the
| altar he cut the victim's bonds, and before their vengeance had time
| to wreak itself, Arthur the deliverer treads the threshold, gleams
| through the nave a destroying angel, ~~ and now the Silver Shield
| rests over Genevieve.
|
|
|
| The fane soon becomes the last theatre of war. Crida rushes in
| with all his tributary kings. Arthur, still in ignorance of his
| relationship to Genevieve, makes his way in wrath to where he
| stands. The old king's sword, wielded with all his strength shivers
| before the diamond glaive. The conqueror's foot is on his breast
| when the maiden springs forward to intercept the descending blow,
| and declares herself the daughter of his prostrate foe. At this
| juncture Harold appears: ~~ his of all that host the only undaunted
| breast. He had assembled and reorganized his broken bands on the
| brow of a neighbouring hill, and now enters the temple to make
| honourable terms for the vanquished, and to offer peace. The
| scene is drawn which there meets his eye: ~~ the idol god
| overthrown amid pools of blood, and the Cross exalted in its place;
| the captive Teuton kings haughty and in chains; Crida apart and
| unbound, one hand concealing his face, the other resting on the
| head of his kneeling child; Genevra by her side, mourning her
| father's and her country's woe, and Lancelot whispering such
| comfort as love could dictate: the circle of knights; the rigid form
| of the Aleman, like some uncouth image of the gods he had
| renounced, and in the midst the hero king, the impersonation of
| honour and fame. In this assemblage Harold proudly offers his
| terms ~~ peace, their captives released, and their kings restored; or
| war while life shall last. Arthur, wise and magnanimous in his
| triumph, accepts peace from his noble foe, a choice welcome to all,
| though
|
|
|
| Standing by the fallen idol's altar, under the holy rood, Merlin now
| utters prophetic words of comfort, and foresees the time when the
| two conflicting races will blend in lasting peace, promising to his
| countrymen the possession of their mountainous empire while time
| shall last. To Harold he foretels that from him shall descend a race
| of Scottish kings, and Lancelot is accepted by the hold heathen as
| his son-in-law.
|
| King Crida does not yield to the dictates of fate so readily, but the
| hero condescends to sue, and his heart relents. Arthur pleads ~~
|
|
|
|
|
| We have thus at some expense of the reader's time attempted to
| give an idea of the fable of the poem, without which no proper
| view of its merits can be gained. We are aware that an abstract
| cannot do justice to its subject, yet a full perusal leaves the same
| impression, of a lack of human interests and of vigorous power to
| arrest and sustain attention. With many striking, effective,
| beautiful parts, the poem fails as a whole. At no time do we feel
| the hero a real personage; we seldom can sufficiently believe in his
| existence to sympathise in his trials, or to feel truly concerned for
| him. His fairy mystic guide greatly aggravates this evil, not only
| from the additional haze of unreality she diffuses round him, but
| that we feel well satisfied she will keep him from all real peril,
| whatever dangers may seem to threaten his path. This unerring
| guardian is open to the objection Dryden makes to the machinery
| of all Christian poets. Like Ariosto's angel in contest with Discord,
| 'who soon makes her know the difference of strength between a
| nuncio of heaven and a minister of hell,' we know (and surely the
| hero also) that giants may threaten, and fiends gibber, and death
| inevitable may seem to oppose his path, but she will in fact bring
| him nowhere where he may not pass safely through.
|
| The rules of criticism, in common with all dogmas, often offend by
| a seeming technicality and trivial attention to forms; a sacrifice of
| real worth and beauty, to dry correctness: yet experience teaches
| us the substantial truth of many a dictum which at one time we
| deemed merely arbitrary; and amongst these is the paramount
| necessity of the subserviency of parts to the whole. This our
| author has not regarded; he has said whatever suited him at the
| time to say, or seemed to enhance the effect of the particular
| portion he was engaged upon. Whether it be a point of erudition to
| be displayed, a fling at a political opponent suggested by the matter
| in hand, a train of speculation or sentiment, appropriate to modern
| times, but professedly from the lips of ancient wisdom ~~ if it
| roughly dispel an allusion; if it weakens our faith; if it loosens our
| hold and our interest on
|
| the main theme, however dear to the author, the mistimed show of
| wit or wisdom should have found no place. In the words of Waller,
| . The present writer has wished to make his poem the
| depository of all his thoughts; to say all he can say; to record his
| view of every topic which has engaged his own or the popular
| attention; to display acquaintance and sympathy with the whole
| field of modern inquiry.
|
| In the preface to his second edition he complacently observes upon
| the charge of too much learning, answering it in the words of a
| modern critic, . A poet ought unquestionably to possess
| learning, but every man's own experience tells him that the most
| learned do not commonly talk most learnedly. We presume that it
| is learning out of place of which the critics complain. What is yet
| crude and of recent acquirement is obtrusively exhibited; the
| accumulated stores of an observant mind, ~~ what have matured
| the understanding and formed the judgment, are no subjects for
| display. They enrich and illustrate every theme, but they are only
| manifest when the occasion asks for them.
|
| We agree with the author in thinking the choice of his metre a
| happy one. He quotes Dryden's emphatic praise of the 'quatrain, or
| stanza of four alternate lines;' but those who are acquainted with
| the only long poem in which Dryden has used it, 'The Annus
| Mirabilis,' will feel how greatly the monotony of this measure is
| relieved by the rhyming couplet which concludes the stanza,
| allowing more scope too, for the completion of the thought or
| picture. Many of the preceding examples prove that our author has
| understood its capabilities. His diction, if not poetical in the
| highest sense, is easy, graceful, and eloquent, well-fitted for the
| alternations of thought and narrative through which his subject
| leads him.
|
| In conclusion, though we have no expectation that the mass of Sir
| E. Bulwer Lytton's readers will acquiesce in his judgment, we are
| inclined to agree with it so far as to believe that of all his works
| 'King Arthur' has perhaps the most claim to a lasting reputation.
| What hindrances we see to the realization of his sanguine hopes for
| this darling of his latest care, we have explained elsewhere. But a
| long poem is a great venture, and it is something even to fail with
| credit, where the stake that is tried for is lasting fame.